TCTS 3 Chapter 41 (Patreon)

This is on the shorter end of chapters for TCTS, but I was just hitting a brick wall, and adding more information made me get lost in what I was trying to write. I actually still have doubts about what I came up with, so this might be a rough chapter. I just needed to get it out of the way to continue advancing and heading towards the end of Book 3.

This chapter was written and expedited in Honor of Director BlutKaiser. I thank you for your immense support!

Mark had taken to working in the library while Lyra slept. Thanks to the enhancements done to his body, spending four days straight without any sleep was light work for Mark. While the rest of the city slept outside, he sat in the wide chair by the empty fireplace with his eyes closed and his mind wide open as the System poured knowledge into him.

A couple of weeks ago, while being idle, he asked the System to show him information about spacecrafts. Along with that, he also started diving into the records that Anahrin had left him, which contained information about Strathari vessels. 

The information was divided by ship classification, with capital ships, such as Cruisers and Carriers, sub-capital ships, which were all class of destroyers, and support/escort ships, which included everything from as small as a fighter to as big as a heavy frigate, or even bigger, transport freighters. The capital ships were beyond him for now, simply due to manufacturing limitations, since they had solved their fuel problems. But the smaller crafts could provide useful.

Fighters, bombers, and gunships were all fast and single-pilot vessels that lived and died in a split second, where a fraction of a second's hesitation meant a debris field and a name read aloud at someone's memorial.

Having been taught about sub-capital ships by Anahrin, he decided that it'd be best to spend time just beginning to understand them. From what Anahrin had left, a Strathari interceptor could change its heading by ninety degrees at a velocity that should have shredded it like wet paper, and turned its pilot into mush, only surviving because of inertial dampening fields that held the pilot's body together when.

Targeting systems had the ability to paint threats across a pilot's awareness faster than thought could form. The gunships, though slower, were no less astonishing. Strathari standards had led them to develop fighters and gunships on the idea that a pilot who felt their craft as an extension of their own flesh should also be able to place a round exactly where their attention went.

The War-Frames were old. The resonance lattice that ran them had been from well over four hundred thousand years ago, refined and rerefined across an unfathomable stretch of time until it became the thing Talos had been used. It was the elder technology. Contrary to it, the piloting systems that ran the fighters and gunships were less than two hundred thousand years old, which made them practically modern. They were what the Strathari had reached for once they'd already mastered the lattice and gone looking for the next problem to solve.

But the interface that ran them didn't work the way the War-Frames did.

There was something else, too, something he'd only half noticed at first and couldn't unnotice now. The System wasn't neutral about where he looked. When he read, the knowledge he consumed filled up new technology bubbles. Some of the branches glowed brighter than others, signifying an added emphasis. He'd assumed it was his own instinct at first, but now he was no longer sure.

"You've stopped moving again," Marcos said in a hushed voice. "Which means you've either found something interesting or you've fallen asleep with your eyes shut. Your heart rate would suggest the former."

"The former," Mark murmured, not opening his eyes. "The smaller crafts don't use anything near full resonance lattices that the War-Frames use, and they're the newer design."

"They can't use something similar," Marcos said. "A fighter would pull maneuvers that would turn an unshielded pilot to paste. If you fed all of that through the full sensory merger the way a War-Frame does, the feedback alone would stop the pilot's heart in a second. You're right to think that they use a reduced interface. The pilot commands the ship through a narrower channel that strips out everything except control."

"Right," Mark said as he opened his eyes, and the blue glow of the System's display brightened, as if responding to his growing thoughts. "And that's the thing I keep turning over. The lattice is way older and allowed the pilot and the machine to become one. But somewhere along the line they built something faster than a pilot could survive merging with, and they had to invent a different way in. The fighter interface is a newer answer to a newer problem. They stopped trying to make the pilot one with the machine and started letting the pilot run it from a half-step back."

"So you're thinking that the fighter's design is what we've been needing all along," Marcos said.

"Yeah," Mark said dejectedly as he stood up. "The small craft uses a reduced interface and accepts the trade. That's the same thing Octavia's been chasing with the attenuation layer, but she's been doing it in software, choking the signal down after the fact. But from what I'm seeing in Anahrin's data, the Strathari themselves eventually built a way to pilot a machine without a total merger. So the question becomes whether we can take the principle behind the newer interface and build something that runs a War-Frame the same way."

"According to this one saying, stating your reasoning allows you to develop it further," Marcos said. "I have to note that that is quite the leap, though an understandable one."

"I dug into it," Mark said as he rose from his chair and paced the room. "I wanted to understand how the newer systems got a pilot to a high enough sync rate to actually fight in a fighter without the full lattice merger. Because reduced interface or not, you still can't fly one of those things on willpower and good intentions. The sync has to come from somewhere."

He paused briefly as he thought of the previous night's work he'd been doing.

"Bioengineering," he repeated, half to himself, half to Marcos.

"That's a broad term," Marcos said. "What kind?"

"Not the kind Vita's working on," Mark's voice had gone quiet and careful. "Think of taking a person who already exists and rebuilding their body to carry the interface... Which is technically what Anahrin did with me. I mean, it makes sense. His specialty was in shipbuilding, not bioengineering, but maybe the process he did was so normal that everyone knew it."

Mark pulled the records he had dug up and read them, and almost immediately, he wished that he hadn't. They were clinical files that Anahrin had left attached to the information of the fighters, and though Marcos had access to the data, he wasn't able to view them due to the parameters Anahrin had set in his programming.

"They reinforced the spinal column," he said. "They replaced sections of bone with alloys while relocating and rebuilding nerve clusters to carry loads they were never grown to handle. Then they cut into the brainstem, and installed hardware that once it was in, couldn't be taken out because their body had rebuilt itself to adopt it as part of its own... You really can't acess these?"

"No," Marcos replied. "Well, technically I have access to them, as in, they are here, I can see then, I can touch them, but I can't open them."

"Fucking parameters," Mark muttered. "Anyway, according to the records Anahrin left, initial experimentation left recovery that ran for months, and some never recovered at all. The ones who did described it as waking up a stranger in their own skin and never quite finding their way home. Even the Strathari, who'd undergone God knows how many rounds of biosculpting to achieve their extreme lifespans, had found it costly enough that they never made it the standard. In a way, the newer technology is shittier than the older technology, which, ironically enough, humanity tends to do that a lot. Go figure just how many bad habits we inherited from them."

"Hmm," Marcos hummed. "That is quite the conundrum."

"They started from a better place than any human ever could, and even they had to be rebuilt to handle piloting their fighters," Mark said as he thought for a moment. "Which means for us, the cost is higher. We'd be starting from further back and asking the body to carry even more... But I guess we have something they didn't have when they walked down this road, and that is hindsight. It's possible that we can reinvent the wheel, so to speak, in a cleaner, smarter, safer, better... a better way. However, I doubt that there's any version of this that's painless."

"Oh wow," Marcos said with genuine surprise. "So this is what you've been up to?"

Mark nodded as Marcos materialized beside him and pulled up a schematic to be projected into the air. It was the human nervous system rendered in fine lines of light, the brain and the long cable of the spinal cord and the branching delta of nerves spreading from it. It was something Mark had spent the past several nights assembling, piece by piece, working from the Strathari records.

"The whole problem is bandwidth," he said. "A War-Frame generates more information than a human nervous system can take through a single point of contact. The lattice solved it with a total merger, spreading the load across the whole nervous system at once, across structures we don't have. The fighter interface solved it by narrowing the channel until what came through was small enough for one well-augmented body to carry. Neither of those works for us straight off the shelf. So I stopped thinking about the channel and started thinking about the load itself. If the problem is too much data through one door, then what if you stop using one door?"

"More doors..." Marcos said slowly. "Are you attempting to distribute the bandwidth across many physical connections, so no single point ever carries enough to overload it?"

"That's the idea," Mark nodded as he manipulated the floating schematic, and two nodes brightened under his hand. "Two neural links to start. One here, at the base of the skull, where the brainstem meets the cord, and the other one here, at the top of the spine. Those two will carry the high-level traffic and send the pilot's intent out to the machine, and the critical feedback coming back in. Command and control."

"What are you planning for the rest of the load?" Marcos asked.

Mark drew his fingers down the rendered spine, and points of light lit up where he traced.

"Ports," he said. "I was thinking of the Sci-fi culture I once knew. You could have jacking ports set into the spine itself since the spinal cord is already the body's main trunk line. Every signal between the brain and the body already runs through it, so you tap it at multiple points along its length, and let those points carry the bandwidth the two neural links can't manage alone. They'd pretty much be seamless when they're not in use. Barely there under the skin. But when a pilot needs to jack into a frame, they plug straight into the cord."

The library was quiet for a while.

"How many ports are you planning to have?" Marcos asked.

"That's what I haven't decided on yet," Mark said. "The sync rate would scale with the number of ports. You can power a frame on with a handful of ports, walk it around, but I don't think you'd be able to fight in it all too well since the control just isn't there. It's simple, really. More ports, more bandwidth, more sync, more control."

He gestured, and a graph rose beside the schematic, the sync rate climbing against the port count, the curve steepening as it rose.

"I believe that a minimum to actually pilot one is around four ports," he went on. "Below that, you've got an expensive way to make a statue. Four to eight gives you real capability, matching or beating what Octavia's attenuation layer can do. And the ceiling... is twelve."

He turned to look at Marcos' avatar, who had the appearance of a butler. "One for each of the thoracic vertebrae. At twelve ports, the distributed interface should carry enough bandwidth that I speculate would be a sync rate close to what a Strathari got out of the full lattice.

"And I chose the thoracic spine specifically for a reason," he added. "The neck's too dense with critical pathways. Tap into the cervical vertebrae and you're gambling with paralysis or death on every port. The lower back's also too far from the major signal trunks to carry the load cleanly. But the stretch through the middle of the back sits in the sweet spot. Enough room between the vital parts to set the ports in safely and close enough to the cord's main channels to carry the bandwidth."

"So let me get this straight, the maximum is dictated by the patient's own skeleton," Marcos said.

"Pretty much," Mark nodded.

The room went quiet once again, then Marcos spoke, and his tone had changed.

"Mark, this is extraordinary work, truly. But I want to ask you a question, and I'd like you to sit with it before you answer," Marcos said. "How much of this did you actually arrive at on your own?"

Mark stopped. It was the question he'd been steering around for days, and Marcos had walked straight up and set it on the table between them.

He thought back through it. He'd drawn every line of that schematic, run the bandwidth math himself, worked out the anatomy port by port until it sat right with him and the shape held together. No part of it had come to him finished. But the direction he had taken to arrive at this conclusion was not one he could quite call his own. Every time his attention had wandered, his system had pulled it back, brightening the branch that led him to search through what Anahrin had left for information regarding the small crafts, then the one that led to the reduced interface, and then the one that led to bioengineering. Though it had never told him what to build, he had pretty much been pointed which way to go.

"The design's mine," he said. "But the path I walked to get here, I'm not sure that was. The System has kind of been steering me with these developments as of late. Like it already knew where I'd end up and was clearing the way ahead of me."

"That is worth considering," Marcos said. "It might be a problem. It might be a gift. If your System is lighting certain paths and dimming others, it is interpreting the data structure Anahrin left behind. The work is yours, Mark. The question is whether the trail led to the correct destination."

Mark dropped back into the chair and stared at the schematic, watching the spine glow with twelve points of light.

"Tell me," he said. "According to my scheamtics, do you think that it will hold, or did I follow a bright trail off a cliff?"

"I have been running it," Marcos said, and paused for a moment that was longer than his usual. "The theory behind it seems to hold. The bandwidth distribution is a sound application, and the relationship between port count and synchronization tracks. As for the two-neural-link configuration for command and feedback, it seems to me that it is more elegant than the approach that Strathari had used. Theoretically, the design will work."

"But there is a complication," Mark said.

"Yes, there is a wall," Marcos confirmed. "No baseline human will ever survive this. The twelve spinal ports carrying full War-Frame bandwidth will overload an ordinary nervous system. The pilot's body must route and process that volume of information without cooking itself, which a baseline human simply cannot do. The augmentation would most definitely require implants and a capable body."

Mark nodded. Hearing the assessment made the situation clear.

"Walk me through the physical requirements," he said. "What must a person undergo before they can hold all this?"

"I'll suggest several things," Marcos said as he took control fo the schematic. "First, the nervous system requires reinforcement sicne the nerves must carry signal loads orders of magnitude past baseline. I also believe that a myelin augmentation and structural reinforcement of the major nerve trunks are necessary. A rebuilt spinal cord must route twelve simultaneous high-bandwidth streams without signal bleed. You are essentially replacing a fraction of the pilot's natural wiring with engineered substitutes.

"Second is the brain. The two neural links push processing demands into the cortex that an ordinary brain cannot sustain. You must augment the regions carrying the load and raise their throughput. You will likely need buffering to prevent an overload cascade and keep the brain from burning itself out when the full load arrives.

"Third, we would need to augment the body's support systems. The metabolic demand of running this interface is likely to be severe. A pilot jacked into a frame at full sync burns fuel they'd need for an engagement that could last hours. The cardiovascular system and the cellular energy production must be uprated to feed a body working that hard. Otherwise, the pilot will win the battle and die of the strain an hour later."

Mark studied the amber-lit figure and the scope of the procedure lay bare in front of him. "We are rebuilding the whole person around the capability."

"You are rebuilding the person," Marcos said. "The procedure is extensive and permanent, meaning that you cannot ask a colonist to volunteer for it and must choose from the viable candidates, which would be people whose bodies have already been pushed to the natural peak of humanity."

"The Peacekeepers," Mark said.

"The Peacekeepers," Marcos agreed. "Your Elites are already enhanced. Their nervous systems already run past standard human tolerances. This is why they can survive the War-Frame interface at reduced bandwidth. They are the closest thing we have to viable candidates, even they are unprepared for this modification. The augmentation to hold twelve ports goes well past what they currently carry."

Mark sat with the information as the weight of the decision settled over him.

"It affects the hardware as well," he said. "If we build a distributed system instead of the lattice, the frames must change. They are built to connect through the lattice. The contact layer and the control architecture assume a single total merger. We must reinvent the way a War-Frame meets a pilot."

"Yes," Marcos said. "This is a reinvention. It is only logical that you'd need new interface hardware in the frames. Interesting to see you setting both the lattice and the fighter interface aside as templates and building your own from first principles."

Mark pulled up a cross-section of a War-Frame cockpit, rendering the contact layer in fine detail.

"From what we've gathered, the current cockpit is built around the lattice," he said. "The pilot sits in the chair while the contact layer reads the whole nervous system at once, and the lattice turns that into motion. Everything moves through that single connection."

He highlighted the contact surface. "I believe we'll have to remove the contact layer and install a physical docking interface with port receivers built into the seat, which would allow for the neural links to sync to the frame's command system. The join will essentially end up becoming a hardware connection."

"A hardware connection is much simpler," Marcos said. "And I believe there may even be an unexpected upside in the shape of Modularity. With the lattice, every pilot would need to meet certain biological constraints. But a port-based system would utilize standardized hardware, meaning that any augmented pilot with the right ports can jack into any frame built to receive them. That would allow for ease of maintenance and also the ability to rotate pilots between frames. We can repair the interface without gutting the whole cockpit, scale it, add more ports for the pilots who can carry them, and we can install fewer for the ones who cannot, since they would all run on the same fundamental architecture. Your concept has enough flexibility that it can bend to fit what we actually have."

"That's the plan," Mark nodded. He stood there a while, looking at the glowing frame and the glowing spine beside it. The project would likely take an additional number of months' worth of work, and he would need to redirect the entire War-Frame program toward an unproven approach. "It will work."

"It would," Marcos agreed. "Granted, we are pretty much going off on a limb that the augmentation succeeds and the interface redesign holds."

Mark sank back into the chair and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

"Run a full feasibility simulation," he said. "I need the augmentation procedures and the projected survival odds, and I want to know exactly what we face before I bring it to anyone else."

"I have already begun," Marcos said. "I advise you to bring Octavia in early since she's already an integral part of this project and, aside from Talos, has actual experience piloting these. She will catch things we both miss."

Mark looked at the schematic one last time. A year ago, he would not have conceived the design, but it now hung in the air. It was a blueprint that braided together two technologies separated by millennia and stripped them both to create a third one.

Mark left the library and climbed the stairs toward his room as behind him, the display winked out. As he climbed, something pricked at his mind, and it was the fact that the system seemed to be nudging him along a certain path. But he couldn't understand just why. Sure, he wanted to develop these War-Frames to the level that they actually became viable, but when he had done the same with other technologies, the system had not acted this way.